Reform the Reporters

The media didn't get up in the morning and pronounce themselves completely unreliable. They didn't suggest their crystal balls or mood rings were going in the garbage can. They simply moved on and declared it a "huge win" for Kerry and a "miserable" night for Dean.

The "game" of the campaigns is all about defying the media's own expectations instead of simply impressing voters. Every calculation is fixated on capturing the media's imagination and securing the media's official recognitions of momentum. They reward candidates who "beat expectations" and shove aside those who underwhelm them. The whole spectacle displays how the media greedily grasp for more power than the voters in picking our presidents.

The titans of the major media don't see themselves as in need of reform. They think the voters have to be reformed, not the media. In Newsweek magazine, Evan Thomas mourned the "Closing of the American Mind," and regurgitated the faddish media analysis that we live in a world of "hyperpartisanship," and most voters are either angry, partisan political junkies or disaffected voters who tune out the news media and obsess instead over Xbox, the Home Shopping Network or "Girls Gone Wild" videos. Apparently, Thomas believes that if you're going to insult the disaffected voter, you might as well go for it.

The complaint of "hyperpartisanship," of a political system with no charity in it, is an odd complaint from a news magazine that disses Vice President Dick Cheney a few pages earlier in that same issue as a "secretive, trigger-happy, fossil-fuel lover."

In the coming primary elections, voters ought to vote on their own instincts and not listen to the liberal media's instant judgments of which candidate is golden and which candidate is toast. If the media elite really thinks that the casual voter is an Xbox-obsessed simpleton or an air-headed TV home-shopper, why should he or she heed the media's unceasing advice?